A brief account of my trip to La Gomera and Tenerife January 2009 with Neil Armstrong.
I'd been to Puerto de la Cruz in northern Tenerife for a holiday with my wife a
year or so back and caught some tantalising glimpses of what you can see just
under the surface of what is generally considered to be a clichéd tourist
destination. A far cry from the more southern resorts of
Playa de Las Americas and Los Cristianos, northern Tenerife has outstanding
beauty and a fascinating flora and I promised to return there for a more plant
intense visit. After as decent an interval as I could allow I got in touch
with my friend Neil Armstrong, who I knew was also keen to go, and we started to
make the necessary arrangements.
Neil suggested adding on a couple of days at La Gomera, the nearest island, to visit the pristine Laurisilva forest there - there are still forested areas remaining on Tenerife and other islands, but Gomera boasts the largest uninterrupted area of such left on the planet and represents a time capsule of the flora that covered much of the Mediterranean region before the last ice age changed the climate. The island has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the central high plateau forests form the Parque Nacional de Garajonay.
So - we flew to Tenerife south airport, then on to Los
Cristianos from where we caught the slow-but-cheaper ferry (60 mins) to the
capital of La Gomera - San Sebastián. Here is a view of La Gomera as you
approach from Los Cristianos on the ferry - looks like a Lost World up there and
very exciting!
As we approached the harbour at San Sebastián we got a good idea of what the
town was like - colourful picture postcard pretty houses dotting up the
hillsides:
The marina:
General views around town
A captivatingly charming colonial town, spotlessly clean. It reminded me strongly of a smaller version of a town in Chiapas, Mexico, I had visited - San Cristóbal de las Casas. We got there a little too late to do anything much other than wander around and get our bearings - didn't take long as the town isn't very big.